As someone who fervently plays the tank class of Dungeons & Dragons, I always leaned in to using Reckless Attacks as a Barbarian. An easy way to get Advantage on attack rolls to help ensure you slay the villain in front of you? Yes please! I love playing this class as someone who can do massive damage as well as a guardian of sorts for the group, so using this feature always made sense to me.

But surprisingly, I’ve had players at my tables who have played Barbarians that were hesitant to use this feature. If you’re not familiar with Reckless Attacks, it’s a 2nd level feature of the Barbarian:

You can throw aside all concern for defense to attack with increased ferocity. When you make your first attack roll on your turn, you can decide to attack recklessly. Doing so gives you Advantage on attack rolls using Strength until the start of your next turn, but attack rolls against you have Advantage during that time.

So understandably, some players are reluctant to use this feature if it means any attack against them has Advantage. If you have a group of villains that see you going Reckless, they can easily gang up on you, which means multiple attacks against you are more than likely to succeed.

And to that, I say – let them!

WATCH: Go Reckless Or Go Home

Why You Should Use Reckless Attack As Often As Possible

As a Barbarian, that role is to not only deal major damage, but to take some major damage, too. That’s the benefit of your Rage feature is to be able to cut the physical damage in half. Sure, it won’t cut any other type of damage in half, but there are still ways to be able to do that with certain species, magic items, or even taking Path of the Wild Heart. But taking the brunt of those physical attacks allows you to stay up longer, take more hits, and be a lightning rod for those villains while potentially taking away their focus from the rest of your party. Doing this can allow the party to strategize how to help you in this encounter with their abilities as well by feeling a bit more protected in this way.

And there’s a lot of great roleplay opportunities as well for this. Going in reckless can show how much you care for the people in your party. You can show recklessness as a way to demonstrate your ferocity to your foes. It can also be a characteristic where you can lean into the carelessness of your character as well (either because they don’t care or they’re just oblivious). And Barbarian’s are a marital class that uses intuition when they engage in combat rather than trained fighting, so Reckless Attacks reflects that well.

Mechanically, there’s also other reasons why you want to optimize using Reckless Attack as a Barbarian (using 2024 rules):

• Opportunity Attacks. Using Reckless Attack on your turn means that you can also attack with Advantage on any Opportunity Attacks you make until the start of your next turn.
• Brutal Strike. At Level 9, you can use “Brutal Strike”, which requires you to forego Advantage on only one of your attacks, but if you hit, you add a d10 of damage to your damage roll plus an additional effect of your choice (which can be beneficial to you and your party, especially at Level 13). After you use this, you can still attack with Advantage with your other attacks.
• Frenzy Attack. As a Path of the Berserker Barbarian, your Frenzy Attack adds extra damage if you use Reckless, dealing a number of d6s equal to your Rage Damage Bonus (so at level 3, you’re adding 2d6s to one of your attacks on your turn).
• Cancelling Out Disadvantage. If you gain a condition that imposes Disadvantage your attack, attacking Reckless cancels that out, making your attack roll a straight d20 roll.
• Weapon Master Properties. It increases your odds of being able to land more attacks or take out more villains if you have a weapon with the Cleave or Nick property.

So even though you may get targeted with Advantage attacks, there’s a lot of benefits already with using Reckless Attacks as a Barbarian.

When You Should NOT Use Reckless

Never. Always use Reckless Attack.

… okay, as much as I want to leave it at that, there may be times when you might want to think about if using Reckless Attack is a good idea or not. For starters, if your Armor Class is low, that does mean that you are more likely to get hit with an Advantage attack. As a Barbarian, you do get Unarmored Defense which helps if you don’t have Medium Armor to wear, but even then, the highest you could get with that is 16 if you use Point Buy and dump your Intelligence (INT), Wisdom (WIS), and Charisma (CHA) stats. This may be an attractive option for some, but I personally may only use one Stat as a dump stat. Dumping all 3 is a bit much for me, and I don’t always want to play the stereotypical “all brawn, no brain” Barbarian. Regardless, as a Barbarian you should be using Medium Armor or getting your Unarmored Defense at around AC 15 so help reduce that likelihood of getting hit.

Another thing to keep in mind is to assess the situation you are in as well. If you are attacking Recklessly against a group of creatures that primarily does non-physical damage, then your Barbarian Rage won’t give you Resistance to that damage. So giving the enemies a way to take you down more quickly with damage that you can’t reduce may be a time to be more strategic with your Reckless Attacks.

You also want to keep in mind that any attack roll against you will have Advantage when you use Reckless Attacks. So this also includes any spell attacks as well as ranged attacks. So if you have a lot of enemies that are off at a distance, you may want to reserve your Reckless until you get closer to them (and don’t forget, when you use Reckless Attack, your ranged attacks that use Strength as Advantage as well!).

So yes, there are some circumstances where you may not want to use Reckless, and even within an encounter itself, you may want to be strategic about what turn you want to use Reckless Attack as well. But for the most part, you’ll want to use Reckless when you can since some of your features requires you to use Reckless to attack and not just having Advantage on the attack itself.

Mitigating Advantage Attacks Against You

If you are still hesitant about using Reckless Attacks because of the enemies having Advantage on attacks against you, there are a few ways that can help.

• Magic Items. There are magic items that can help with Advantage attacks against you, such as the Cloak Of Displacement, which imposes Disadvantage on attacks against you until you take damage. So this will help reduce the likelihood of you getting hit with an attack since it turns that Advantage attack into a straight attack roll.
• Weapon Master Properties. There are certain weapons that can give you certain benefits, such as having the Vex property (which gives you Advantage on your next attack, so you may not need to attack recklessly to get that Advantage) or the Sap property, which imposes Disadvantage on the attacker’s next attack roll (not all of them – just the next one they take). However, weapons with these properties aren’t Heavy, which means their damage die is considerably less than using a Greataxe, Greatsword, or Maul.
• Teamwork. This is when working with your party and their abilities can also come in handy. The Clockwork Sorcerer can use their reaction to turn that attack against you into a straight d20 roll. Other characters can use their abilities, spells, or magic items to help prevent your enemies from attacking, etc. Oh – and Silvery Barbs.
• Feats. When you get to certain levels, you can take a Feat that can help with Advantage attacks against you. Lucky allows you to spend a Luck point to impose Disadvantage on an attack roll against you. Poisoner allows you to apply Poison to your weapon and if you hit an enemy with it and they fail a Constitution saving throw, they get the Poisoned condition until the end of your next turn, which means they have Disadvantage on attacks. Slasher is also a possibility, which imposes Disadvantages on attack rolls until the start of your next turn if you hit them with a Critical Hit, but that’s more difficult to achieve and you are limited to a slashing weapon. Also, the Tough feat increases your Hit Point Maximum so it makes it harder for you to go down.
• Character Options. You can select certain options for your character that will help give you resistance with other types of damage, such as the Barbarian subclass Path of the Wild Heart, choosing an Aasimar, Dragonborn, Dwarf, or Tiefling to gain damage resistance, and so on.

So… Go Reckless Or Go Home

Hopefully his has convinced you to use Reckless Attacks more as a Barbarian. If you are still hesitant to use it often, I offer this one last thought to think on. Epic moments rarely happen from playing it safe. You can do the math to figure out the likelihood of hits succeeding against you and taking you down if you give enemies advantage to their attacks, but if you embrace that chaos and go hard into that Barbarian spirit, you’ll definitely have moments that you’ll remember for a lifetime. It’s a great feature to have for a class that’s designed to be a tank and takes less damage from physical attacks. Leaning into the archetype of a brutal warrior that uses instinct over training, Reckless Attacks absolutely gives that flavor that players should embrace and utilize as much as possible.